Produce personalized presentation boards that distill complex concepts into simple visual representations with a few helpful tools and effects.

A new collection of five minute-long On Design stories—developed by the team behind Section D, Monocle 24's 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft—profile a person, survey a place, or unpack an idea that’s changing or shaping design and architecture today. We've selected fourteen of our favorites from the ongoing series, examining issues as wide as Postmodernism and the architectural competition, to five-minute profiles of Alvaro Siza, Josef Hoffman, Kengo Kuma and Superstudio.

BDP and Wolfgang Buttress’ pavilion, The Hive, has been awarded the 2016 Landscape Institute Award for Best Design for a Temporary Landscape as part of their 2016 awards program.

Judges for the award noted the project’s ability to interact with its site, remarking that they were ‘impressed by the quality and simplicity of the design and execution, in particular the way in which the design works with a sensitive landscape to provide a beautiful and functional temporary setting for the installation, and a longer-term facility for events and education.”

The world’s first solar panel road has officially opened in a small village in Normandy, France.

Built in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche, the 1 kilometer route, dubbed the “Wattway,” is covered in 2,800 square meters of photovoltaic panels. It is designed to be used by up to 2,000 motorists per day, while providing an average of 767 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per day, enough energy to power all of the street lighting in the 3,400-resident village.

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The Eero Saarinen-designed US Embassy in Oslo is set to be placed under historic preservation orders following the building’s sale by the US government.

The US embassy to Norway since 1959, the building will change hands once staff are moved into the new US embassy building at Huseby, which is expected to complete in early 2017.

For children especially, hospitals can be anxiety-inducing and overwhelming space. New media studio ENESS aims to change that experience with their installation LUMES, a light-emitting wood piece, the first of which is now on display at Cabrini Hospital in Malvern, Australia.

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Awarding the top ecological projects of the year, d3 has announced this year’s winners of its Natural Systems competition. Established in 2009, the annual competition has grown into one of the most notable awards in speculative, performance-based design. The brief challenges architects, designers, engineers, and students to develop ideas for sustainable living by exploring natural processes. This year’s program was co-directed by Ji Young Kim of Shigeru Ban Architects and Gregory Marinic of the Syracuse University School of Design.

Read on to find out about the jury’s picks for the top three projects and seven special mentions.

Built by Associative Data, showcase their acclaimed data analysis with K1299, a new mixed-use project in Lebanon. The site was addressed through various different lenses: traffic noise, view perspectives, solar radiation, and market potential.

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Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen will be the focus of the Season 30 Finale of American Masters, the PBS documentary program that highlights the preeminent cultural icons of United States’ history.

Co-produced by Saarinen’s son, Eric, the documentary will dig into the life and work of the visionary architect, covering seminal projects including St. Louis' iconic Gateway Arch, the General Motors Technical Center, New York's TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Yale University's Ingalls Rink and Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, and Virginia's Dulles Airport.

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Hello Wood has continued its tradition of building socially responsive Christmas trees in European cities though its latest addition, the Tree of Arts, built in front of Budapest’s largest concert hall, Müpa, also known as the Palace of Arts.

Based on the idea that the spirit of Christmas should live beyond the holiday season and continue to symbolize community-building and sustainability into the New Year, the 11-meter tall tree made from lightboxes will be recycled into display units for the inside of the cultural venue in 2017.

Lightboxes in the installation feature the names of performances that will be visiting Budapest in the coming year, including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, John McLaughlin, and Cameron Carpenter.

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The winners of the Kunstsilo (Art Silo) competition to convert a 1935 harbor-side grain silo into an art museum in Kristiansand, Norway have been announced, with one overall winner and five runners up. MESTRES WÅGE ARQUITECTES and MX_SI ARCHITECTURAL STUDIO, a team from Barcelona, have won the competition, out of 101 proposals, with their concept, SILOSAMLINGEN (“The Silo Collection”), which, according to the jury, “demonstrates a crystal-clear combination of architectural self-assurance and humble respect for the silo building and its newly assigned task.”

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London-based Dutch architect Matthijs Ia Roi has won the Belgian Monument Competition with his proposal, Museum of Hospitality, which will be built in Amersfoort, Netherlands.

The museum will serve as a symbol of hospitality for refugees in the Netherlands and will compliment the neighboring World War I monument, which was a gift from Belgium in recognition of the Netherlands hosting Belgian soldiers during the war.

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'Tis the season for offices from around the world to send us a bit of holiday cheer! See our favorites below (or check out our reader-submitted cards).

Here’s to a wonderful, architecture-filled 2017!

Happy Holidays from the ArchDaily team!

Narrative has a powerful place in architecture, and some of the most enduring narratives come in the form of fairy tales. A recent series by Places Journal brings the two directly together, exploring “the intimate relationship between the domestic structures of fairy tales and the imaginative realm of architecture.” The curation team reflects this duality, with the diverse collection put together by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. Read on for a quick look at four new additions to the series released by Places Journal this week.

Architects and students of architecture stereotypically never stop making, and their creative talents continue to flow irrespective of the holiday season. Our annual challenge is an unashamed way to channel the inventiveness, originality and artistry of our readers from around the world into that most humble of gifts: the holiday card. Out of the 200 submissions, these are 43 of our favorites.  

Featured gif by Rebecca Lou

The Pillars is a new monument in the heart of Copenhagen dedicated to informing the public through a combination of national data and artistic beauty. Inspired by other nationally recognized works such as the 10,000 Year Clock in Texas; Mount Rushmore in South Dakota; and the Fühlometer (Feel-o-Meter) in Lindau, Germany, The Pillars encourages both citizens and leaders to understand the facts of their national development.

Amsterdam-based Rietveld-Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF) and Atelier de Lyon have revealed designs to reimagine one of The Netherland's monumental "tribute[s] to the majesty, and seemingly indestructible power, of the Dutch Delta Works." The works themselves—a network of dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees and storm surge barriers in South Holland—have collectively been described as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Deltawerk 1:1 is an intervention examining the practice of the preservation of cultural heritage by inserting a new structure within Waterloopbos, the former Dutch Hydrodynamics Laboratory.

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Ennead Architects has broken ground on the construction of an addition to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, the country’s oldest continuously operating museum (since 1799).

The expansion project includes a new 40,000 square foot wing and 17,500 square feet of renovation to adjacent structures. Upon completion, total gallery space will be increased by 15% for a total of 100,000 square feet, making the Peabody Essex into one of the top 20 art museums in the country.

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The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has released its Home Design Trends Survey for the third quarter of 2016, which focuses on community and neighborhood design. According to the Survey, homeowners are generally expressing more interest in community development, as indicated by the popularity of thoughtful community design with access to amenities.

There is additionally, according to the Survey, a demand for walkable neighborhoods, access to public transportation, and multi-generational housing, as well as a demand for more and larger glass windows, driven by building technologies like smart glass windows.

In 2014, Snøhetta was announced as one of two winners in a competition to design new banknotes for the Norwegian Bank. Now, after 2 years of development, the first bills have been produced and are nearly ready to begin full circulation.

To coincide with the occasion, Norges Bank has released a series of videos explaining the design and production process. Check them out below.

Studio Libeskind and the Dutch Auschwitz Committee have revealed plans for the Holocaust Monument of Names, to be located in the heart of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural District. Incorporating the letters of the Hebrew word לזכר (meaning “In Memory of”), the memorial will be the first to memorialize the names of all 102,000 Dutch victims of the Holocaust.

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‘Green corridor,' ‘green connections,' and a ‘green program’ are coming to Vietnam's third largest city, Da Nang. Antwerp-based design company OMGEVING and partners was awarded a joint first place prize — out of 39 applicants —for the design competition for Da Nang's Han Riverfront master plan that has an estimated cost of 85 million euros.

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